Recently in The Economist Gavin Jackson asked what looks like an intelligent question: “What is the price of clean air?” (And we respond with “Why can’t prestigious media outfits post their newsletters online in the year of grace 2025?” so no link.) There are people, many people, who claim it is grubby to attach dollar values to valuable things. But in the real world everything is a trade-off since not even the richest and most powerful can devote more than 24 hours per day to the ensemble of things they value doing. And since any given reduction in pollution requires that you either expend a certain amount of wealth or desist from generating it, there is always a cost. The worse the pollution and the smaller the sacrifice the more worthwhile it is. But you hit a point where it’s no longer worthwhile; as Thomas Sowell once observed on the same theme but regarding health, it would not be rational to spend half the GDP to get rid of every last case of acne. Jackson then noted that smog in Mumbai is much worse than in London. Instead of reasoning that it goes to show that in poorer countries the need for extra wealth makes fighting pollution less rational, he somehow concluded instead that “America is breaking with the clean-air consensus” because the EPA has scrapped the endangerment finding for carbon dioxide, which environmental groups apparently claim “will lead to between 15,000 and 77,000 premature deaths by 2055.” As if CO2 were, well, pollution and cutting it were free. What is the price of stupidity? The world seems determined to learn the hard way.
Smog is nasty stuff. Those “romantic” pea soup fogs in Sherlock Holmes stories caused pain, suffering and death. But they were not composed of CO2. Real smog, the actual pollution kind, is particulates, volatile organic compounds, ozone (necessary on high, nasty down low), sulphur oxides, nitrogen oxides and yes carbon monoxide. But no, not carbon dioxide, methane etc. And people in the climate business really ought to know carbon from carbon dioxide.
Carbon is soot. CO2 is not. To argue otherwise is, well, dirty.
When it comes to quantifying the health costs of actual air pollution, there is a reason Britain took decisive action after the last monstrous “Great Smog” in 1952. Or rather, three reasons.
First, the smog was deadly. Second, the country was rich enough that the resources necessary to stop smog, including foregone activities as well as pollution abatement devices installed, was well worth it. Third, the wealth came from the same source as the pollution; without the massive increase in power generation due to the Industrial Revolution driven by coal then oil, there would have been neither the need nor the capacity to do anything. Even as late as the 1890s, people were dying from so many other poverty-related causes that smog was not a sensible priority. Indeed the word itself, a portmanteau of smoke and fog, wasn’t coined until the early 20th century. And by the mid-20th century it was a sensible priority. (As also with Los Angeles’ infamous air pollution around the same time.)
In India, for a long time air pollution came from traditional fuels like wood and dung and nothing could be done because without those fires the inhabitants would not have food or warmth. But as the country industrialized, especially after ditching the post-World-War-II Soviet-style central planning, it generated more power, more wealth and more pollution. One might describe it as moving from artisanal to mass-produced smog. But it is also crossing the line into a wealthy society where pollution abatement is not just feasible but cost-effective.
Yes, cost-effective. As Sowell also said in Is Reality Optional?:
“If a trade-off has to be made, we can at least have the moral courage to face it, instead of kidding ourselves with words. Yet the intelligentsia go around saying things like ‘It’s not a question of either/or,’ and using phrases like ‘win, win.’”
But, he added:
“The anointed don’t like to talk about painful trade-offs. They like to talk about happy ‘solutions’ that get rid of the whole problem – at least in their imagination.”
To give the last word to Mr. Spock: “there are always alternatives.” And the logical thing to do is to choose those whose net benefits are highest. Fighting smog pays off for all but very poor societies. Fighting carbon dioxide does not.
